It’s possible, as some of my friends argue, that I’m not actually sane. That would explain why I try to put my finger in the dyke of big government as more and more new leaks keep developing. Only a crazy person would fight against big government when politicians and bureaucrats have a “public choice” incentive to do the wrong thing.

But allow me to offer a reason for optimism. What if we decide that “victory” is simply hindering the growth of government so that the private sector has enough “breathing room” to continue making our lives richer and better?

That’s the basic message of Human Progress, Marian Tupy’s website showing how the world is constantly improving. And we see good long-run developments from Economic Freedom of the World.

In other words, we don’t need to achieve Libertarian Nirvana. We just need to throw sand in the gears of government.

And that’s why I don’t think my life is pointless. To be sure, I haven’t given up on my dream of replacing the odious internal revenue code with a flat tax, but if the only thing I achieve is to protect America from a value-added tax, I’ll nonetheless go to my grave feeling like I did something very valuable for my country.

But there’s something else that keeps me sane. I also enjoy laughing at government. I regularly write about “great moments” in government and point out that incompetence and stupidity is a regular feature of the federal government, of state governments, and of local governments.

And I also enjoy mocking the spectacular screw-ups and bizarre blunders that are a feature of foreign governments as well.

And that’s our topic for today. So let’s start with this story from India about a very unusual example of vote buying.

A south Indian state has become possibly the first in the world to offer publicly-funded breast implants, its health minister arguing, “Why should beauty treatment not be available to the poor?” The Tamil Nadu state health department on Wednesday launched the free service at a clinic in the capital Chennai. …The clinic had already been providing breast reconstruction surgery for cancer patients, but was now extending the service for people who wished to alter the size of their breasts for other health or cosmetic reasons. The head of plastic surgery at the clinic, Dr V Ramadevi, said some of her patients…sought to augment or shrink their breasts for a boost in confidence. “There is a psychological benefit. Many girls who have larger breasts don’t like to go out. There is no reason this surgery should be restricted from the poor.” The procedure would also be available to men, she said. …Tamil Nadu’s government is known for its largesse, particularly under former chief minister Jayalalithaa, who pioneered free food canteens and doled out wedding jewellery and venues to the poor.

Prince Laurent of Belgium has had his monthly allowance docked for a year, after a vote by the country’s federal parliament. The sanction was imposed after the prince attended a Chinese embassy reception last year without government permission, in full naval uniform. Lawmakers voted for a 15% cut to his €307,000 (£270,000; $378,000) annual allowance. …Prince Laurent, who is the younger brother of King Philippe, wrote a lengthy emotional letter to parliament before the vote on his endowment, arguing that, as a royal, he is unable to work for a living. He described the vote as “the trial of my life” and said it would “likely cause me serious prejudice” if MPs went against him. …The prince, 54, said the royal family had obstructed his attempts to be financially independent. …Lawmakers ultimately rejected his claim that no citizen of their country had been so exploited, voting to cut his stipend by 93 to 23 votes. …He had previously been criticised for attending meetings in Libya when the late Muammar Gaddafi was still in power, and making an unsanctioned 2011 trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a former Belgian colony.

I suppose this is a feel-good story in that politicians actually voted to cut spending.

Though we should never forget that this is the country where the public sector consumes half of economic output but officials actually complained that it’s hard to fight terrorism because of “the small size of the Belgian government.”

When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad unexpectedly won his bid for office in May, he pledged to…get the country’s $250 billion worth of debt under control. And this week, he announced the government had found a way to at least get started: crowdfunding. Within 24 hours, the “Malaysia Hope Fund” raised almost $2 million, the BBC reported. “The rakyat (people) voluntarily want to share their earnings with the government to help ease the burden,” the finance ministry said in a statement, announcing that it would be accepting donations to a special fund set up to help relieve the country’s debt. …The crowdfunding idea started with a 27-year-old named Nik Shazarina Bakti, who recently launched a private crowdfunding initiative to help relieve Malaysia’s debt. She raised around $3,500 before the government stepped in. In a sense, the effort is a version of what she said Malaysians did during their struggle for independence from Britain, when they donated jewelry, money and valuables. It’s also similar to what South Korea did as it attempted to pull itself out of economic crisis in the late 1990s, and regular citizens lined up to donate their most prized possessions to the government, including wedding rings and trophies.

Hmmm…, $2 million raised to pay off $250 billion of debt. Methinks they won’t meet their goal.

Though this story reminds me that politicians like Elizabeth Warren want the rest of us to pay more tax, yet she conveniently doesn’t participate in her state’s version of voluntary crowdfunding.

He’s a dead man walking and the court ruling is final. A Romanian court has rejected a man’s claim that he is still very much alive, after he was officially registered as deceased, the Associated Press reports. Constantin Reliu, 63, lost his case in Vasului because he appealed too late on the ruling, a court spokeswoman said Friday. The story goes that Reliu had traveled to Turkey in 1992 for work and lost contact with his family. Since his wife had not heard from her husband in years, she acquired a death certificate for him in 2016, the AP reports. However, since Reliu was discovered by Turkish authorities this year with expired papers, he was deported back to Romania. That’s when he discovered he had been declared dead.

Last but not least, here’s a report from Spain that should leave you skeptical about the efficacy of additional NATO spending.

An attempt to deploy a new submarine for Spain’s navy has run aground again, after it emerged it cannot fit in its dock, Spanish media report. The S-80 boat was redesigned at great expense after an earlier mistake meant it had problems floating, and it was lengthened to correct the issue. Spanish newspaper El País now reports that after the changes, the docks at Cartagena can no longer fit the vessel. The cost for each has almost doubled, the newspaper said. …The original problem with the submarine dates back to 2013, when it was discovered that it was about 100 tons heavier than it needed to be. That caused a problem for its buoyancy – so it could submerge, but might not come back up again. A former Spanish official told the Associated Press at the time that someone had put a decimal point in the wrong place, and “nobody paid attention to review the calculations”. …the base at Cartagena will have to be dredged and reshaped to accommodate the now-floating longer vessel, the El País report said. Spain’s Defence Minister Margarita Robles, speaking on Spanish radio, admitted that “there have been deficiencies in the project”.

Earlier today, I gave a speech about populism and capitalism at the Free Market Road Show in Thessaloniki, Greece.

But I’m not writing about my speech (read this and this if you want to get an idea of what I said about American policy under Trump). Instead, I want to share some remarkable data from a presentation by Ewa Balcerowicz of Poland’s Center for Social and Economic Research.

She talked about “The Post Socialist Transition in Poland in a Comparative Perspective” and showed that Poland and Spain has similar living standards after World War II. But over the next 40 years, thanks to the brutal communist system imposed by the Soviet Union, Poland fell far behind.

But look what has happened over the past 25 years.

Per-capita GDP has skyrocketed in Poland and the gap between the two nations has dramatically narrowed.

So why is Poland now rising relative to Spain?

For the simple reason that public policy has moved in the right direction. Here’s the data from Economic Freedom of the World, comparing Poland’s score in 1990 and today. Poland has jumped from 3.54 to 7.42, and the nation has jumped from a dismal ranking of #104 to a respectable ranking of #40.

And now we have a new applicant from overseas, so maybe we’ll enjoy even more diversity.

The U.K.-based Timesreports on a Spanish bureaucrat that didn’t bother to show up for work for six consecutive years.

A civil servant in Spain didn’t turn up to work for six years. …He had continued to collect his annual salary. Records show that the engineer started working for a water company run by the municipal authorities in Cádiz in 1990 but last did a day’s work in 2004.

Even though this bureaucrat is an amateur compared to the Indian civil servant who skipped work for two decades, I think he’s worthy of membership in the Hall of Fame.

Especially since one aspect of the story perfectly symbolizes the mind-boggling inefficiency of government.

…his absence was noticed only when he was due to collect a long-service award. …Mr Blas said: “We thought the water company had supervised him but it was not the case. We discovered this when we were about to present him with a commemorative plaque for his 20 years of service.”

You may be thinking that this combination of sloth and incompetence at least led to a termination.

Not exactly.

…he cannot be sacked from his €37,000-a-year job as he has since retired.

For what it’s worth, Senor Garcia supposedly is now obliged to return 30,000 euro of his ill-gotten loot.

I’m not holding my breath expecting that to happen.

However, even though it’s not mentioned in the story, I feel very confident that he’ll get a bloated pension courtesy of the Spanish taxpayers.

P.S. Back in 2012, I pointed out that Obama and Romney both were endorsed by different porn stars.

So you probably won’t be surprised to learn that porn stars also are playing a role in the 2016 campaign.

First, the Cruz campaign put together a commercial featuring an actress who is better known for her other roles. The Daily Callerhas the details.

Amy Lindsay, the actress featured in films such asKinky Sex Club,Milf,Carnal WishesandSex Sent Me to the ER starred in Sen. Ted Cruz‘s latest campaign ad entitled “Conservatives Anonymous.” In the ad, the Lindsay said, “Maybe you should vote for more than just a pretty face next time.” Seconds before this story was to be published, the Cruz campaign removed the ad from YouTube.

The Daily Caller also reports that the other conservative senator in the race also has a link to the adult industry.

But there are other developments that deserve attention. Amazingly, some politicians think Europe’s stagnant economy can be improved with more harmonization, more bureaucratization, and more centralization.

The EU Observer has a story about a French scheme to transform the eurozone into a supranational government.

French president Francois Hollande has called for a stronger more harmonised eurozone… “What threatens us is not too much Europe, but too little Europe,” he said in aletterpublished in the Journal du Dimanche. He called for a vanguard of countries that would lead the eurozone, which should have its own government, a “specific budget” and its own parliament. …French prime minister Manuel Valls Sunday said…France would prepare “concrete proposals” in the coming weeks. “We must learn the lessons and go much further,” he added, referring to the Greek crisis.

So why is anyone supposed to believe that adding a new layer of government is going to make Europe more prosperous?

In all likelihood, the French are pursuing this agenda for two selfish reasons.

A “harmonised eurozone” means that all affected nations would have to abide by the same rules, and that inevitably means taxes and regulations are set at the most onerous levels. The French think that’s a good idea because it’s a way of undermining the competitiveness of other eurozone nations.

A eurozone government with a “specific budget” sets the stage for more intergovernmental transfers in Europe. The French think that’s a good idea since they presumably could prop up their decrepit welfare state with money from taxpayers in nations such as Germany, Finland, and the Netherlands.

By the way,not all French politicians are totally misguided.

At least one of them is expressing more sensible ideas, as reported by the U.K.-based Telegraph.

France is “the sick man ofEurope”, François Fillon, the former centre-Right prime minister, has said in an open letter to French presidentFrancois Hollande, calling for urgent economic reforms.“The Greek tragedy shows that the threat of bankruptcy is not abstract,” according to Mr Fillon… French commentators writing about the Greek crisis in recent days have pointed out that France’s own national debt of more than €2 trillion (£1.4 trillion), amounting to 97.5 per cent of GDP, places it in the same league as Spain and other southern European countries.

One of Spain’s “ghost airports”—expensive projects that were virtually unused—received just one bid in a bankruptcy auction after costing about €1.1 billion ($1.2 billion) to build. The buyer’s offer: €10,000. Ciudad Real’s Central airport, about 235 kilometers south of Madrid, became a symbol of the country’s wasteful spending.

But Spanish politicians should be known for more than just misguided boondoggles.

Some of them also are working hard to make sure citizens don’t work too hard. Here’s a story from an English-language news outlet in Spain (h/t: Commentator).

Between the hours of 2pm and 5pm you will struggle to find anyone in the Valencian town of Ador; the town’s inhabitants will have taken to their beds to catch their mandatory forty winks. The town’s summer siesta tradition is so deep-rooted the mayor has enshrined his citizen’s right to an afternoon snooze in law. …Ador could be the first town in Spain to actually make taking a siesta obligatory by law. …The new rules also stipulate that children should remain indoors:

One imagines the next step will be mandatory bed checks by new bureaucrats hired for just that purpose.

Though maybe they would need special permission to take their mandatory siestas from 11:00-2:00 so they would be free to harass the rest of the population between 2:00-5:00.

But it’s time to admit that competition isn’t always a good idea. Particularly when international bureaucracies compete to see which one can promote the most-destructive pro-tax policies.

For instance, I noted early last year that the bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) were pushing a new scheme to increase the global tax burden on the business community.

Then I wrote later in the year that the International Monetary Fund was even more aggressive about pushing tax hikes, earning it the label of being the Dr. Kevorkian of the world economy.

That must have created some jealousy at the OECD, so those bureaucrats earlier this year had a taxpalooza party and endorsed a plethora of class-warfare tax hikes.

Now the IMF has responded to the challenge and is pushing additional tax increases all over the world.

This chart from the IMF shows how much the bureaucracy thinks that the tax should be increased just on coal consumption.

The chart doesn’t make much sense, particularly if you don’t know anything about “gigajoules.” Fortunately, Ronald Bailey of Reason translates the jargon and tells us how this will impact the average American household.

The National Journal reports that the tax rate would be $8 per gigajoule of coal and a bit over $3 per gigajoule of natural gas. Roughly speaking a ton of coal contains somewhere around 25 gigajoules of energy, which implies a tax rate of $200 per ton. …The average American household uses about 11,000 kilowatt hours annually, implying a hike in electric rates of about $1,100 per year due to the new carbon tax. Since the average monthly electric bill is about $107, the IMF’s proposed tax hike on coal would approximately double how much Americans pay for coal-fired electricity. A thousand cubic feet (mcf) of natural gas contains about 1 gigajoule of energy. The average American household burns about 75 mcf of natural gas annually so that implies a total tax burden of $225 per residential customer.

To be fair, the IMF crowd asserts that all these new taxes can be – at least in theory – offset by lower taxes elsewhere.

…we are generally talking about smarter taxes rather than higher taxes. This means re-calibrating tax systems to achieve fiscal objectives more efficiently, most obviously by using the proceeds to lower other burdensome taxes. The revenue from energy taxes could of course also be used to pay down public debt.

If you think something different would happen following the implementation of an energy tax, you win the grand prize for gullibility.

But let’s give the IMF credit. The bureaucrats are equal opportunity tax hikers. They don’t just want higher taxes in the United States. They give the same message everywhere in the world.

Here are some excerpts from an editorial about Spanish fiscal policy in the Wall Street Journal.

Madrid last month cut corporate and personal tax rates, simplified Spain’s personal-income tax system and vowed to close loopholes. That’s good news… So leave it to the austerity scolds at the International Monetary Fund to call for tax increases. …Specifically, the Fund wants Spain to raise value-added taxes, alcohol and tobacco excise taxes, tourism taxes, and various environmental and energy levies: “It will be critical to protect the most vulnerable by increasing the support system for them via the transfer and tax system.”

Gee, I suppose that we should be happy the IMF didn’t endorse higher income taxes as well.

Rather than heed this bad advice, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and Finance Minister Cristobal Montoro are cutting government spending and eliminating wasteful programs to reduce pressure on the public fisc. Public spending amounted to 44.8% of GDP in 2013, which is still too high but down from 46.3% in 2010. The government projects it will fall to 40% by 2017. …Madrid has also made clear that it believes private growth is the real answer to its fiscal woes. …In other words, economic growth spurred by low taxes and less state intervention yields more revenue over time. If Mr. Montoro can pursue the logic of that insight, there’s hope for Spain’s beleaguered economy.

I’m not overly confident about Spain’s future, but it is worth noting that, according to IMF data, government spending has basically been flat since 2010 (after rising by an average of about 10 percent annually in the previous three decades).

So if the politicians can maintain fiscal discipline by following my Golden Rule, maybe Spain can undo decades of profligacy and become the success story of the Mediterranean.

Let’s hope so. In any event, we know some Spanish taxpayers have decided that they’re tired of being fleeced.

We have one final example of the IMF’s compulsive tax-aholic instincts.

Allister Heath explains that the bureaucracy is pushing for a plethora of new taxes on the U.K. economy.

The IMF wants an increase in the VAT burden.

…the IMF wants to get rid or significantly reduce the zero-rated exemption on VAT, which covers food, children’s clothes and the rest. While it is true that the exemptions reduce economic efficiency, ditching them would necessitate a big hike in benefits and a major uplift in the minimum wage, which would be far more damaging to the economy’s performance and ability to create jobs for the low-skilled. It’s a stupid idea and one which would destroy any government that sought to implement it, with zero real net benefit. It would be a horrendous waste of precious political capital that ought instead to be invested in real reform of the public sector.

And an increase in energy taxes.

The report also calls for a greater reliance on so-called Pigouvian taxes, which are supposed to discourage externalities and behaviour which inflicts costs on others. It mentions higher taxes on carbon and on congestion as examples. But what this really means is that the IMF is advocating a massive tax increase on motorists, even though there is robust evidence which suggests that they already pay much more, in the aggregate, than any sensible measure of the combined cost of road upkeep and development, pollution and congestion.

And higher property taxes.

It gets worse: these days, one cannot read a document from an international body that doesn’t call for greater taxes on property. This war on homeowners is based on the faulty notion that taxing people who own their homes doesn’t affect their behaviour, which is clearly ridiculous. This latest missive from the IMF doesn’t disappoint on this front: it calls for the revaluation of property for tax purposes, which is code for a massive increase in council tax for millions of homes, especially in London and the home counties.

Understandably, Allister is not thrilled by the IMF’s proposed tax orgy.

The tax burden is already too high; increasing it further would be a terrible mistake. The problem is that spending still accounts for an excessively large share of the economy, and the political challenge is to find a way of re-engineering the welfare state to allow the state to shrink and the private sector to expand. The model should be Australia, Switzerland or Singapore, countries that boast low taxes and high quality services.

And I particularly like that Allister correctly pinpoints the main flaw in the IMF’s thinking. The bureaucrats look at deficits and they instinctively think about how to close the gap with tax hikes.

That’s flawed from a practical perspective, both because of the Laffer Curve and because politicians will respond to the expectation of higher revenue by boosting spending.

But it’s also flawed from a theoretical perspective because the real problem is that the public sector is far too large in all developed nations. So replacing debt-financed spending with tax-financed spending doesn’t address the real problem (even if one heroically assumes revenues actually materialize and further assumes politicians didn’t exacerbate the problem with more spending).

Here’s a remedial course for politicians, international bureaucrats, and others who don’t understand fiscal policy.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the government plans to lower tax rates on both personal income and corporate income.

Spanish leaders who broke their no-new-taxes pledge after taking office 2½ years ago announced sweeping tax cuts on Friday, saying it was time to compensate a recession-battered populace for its sacrifices and boost a nascent recovery. Budget Minister Cristóbal Montoro, announcing the government’s main economic initiative of the year, said the planned reductions of income and corporate taxes will stimulate investment, creating jobs and making Spanish companies more competitive abroad. …Spain’s corporate tax rate would drop from 30% to 25% by 2016. People earning more than €300,000 ($408,000) a year would see their personal income-tax rate fall from 52%, one of the highest in Europe, to 45% in 2016. …The cuts announced Friday would by 2016 bring income-tax rates back to their pre-2012 levels for high-income earners and lower them slightly for low-income earners.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the tax cuts will happen – or at least won’t be durable – unless Spain’s politicians also impose some long-run spending restraint.

Since we’re on the topic of international tax developments, let’s shift to another story.

If you want hard-core tax enforcement, beyond the fantasies of even the IRS, then it’s hard to beat the ISIS crowd in Iraq.

Let’s not give the IRS any ideas

Here some of what the New York Timesreported on that group’s “tax” regime.

Behind the image of savagery that the extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria present to the world, as casual executioners who kill helpless prisoners and even behead rival jihadis, lies a disciplined organization that employs social media and sophisticated financial strategies in the funding and governance of the areas it has conquered. …Once in charge, they typically levy “taxes,” which are just as lucrative. So-called road taxes of $200 on trucks are collected all over northern Iraq to allow them safe passage. The Iraqi government claims that the insurgents are now levying a “tax” on Christians in Mosul, who were a significant minority there, to avoid being crucified.

Hopefully, this is just a short-run aberration and not a new idea that will spread to other nations.

Though politicians in other countries already have demonstrated that they’re willing to innovate when it comes to extracting money from their citizens.

Countries that slashed health and social protection budgets, like Greece, Italy and Spain, have seen starkly worse health outcomes than nations like Germany, Iceland and Sweden, which maintained their social safety nets and opted for stimulus over austerity.

Greece, Italy, and Spain, by contrast, are among those that increased the size of the public sector. So the argument presented in the New York Times is completely wrong. Indeed, it’s 100 percent wrong because Iceland (which Professor Gurdgiev didn’t measure since it’s not in the European Union) also has smaller government today than it did in the pre-crisis period.

But that’s just part of the problem with the Stuckler-Basu column. They want us to believe that “slashed” budgets and inadequate spending have caused “worse health outcomes” in nations such as Greece, Italy, and Spain, particularly when compared to Germany, Iceland, and Spain.

But if government spending is the key to good health, how do they explain away this OECD data, which shows that government is actually bigger in the three supposed “austerity” nations than it is in the three so-called “stimulus” countries.

Once again, Stuckler and Basu got caught with their pants down, making an argument that is contrary to easily retrievable facts.

But I guess this is business-as-usual at the New York Times. After all, this is the newspaper that’s been caught over and over again engaging in sloppy and/or inaccurate journalism.